Why Fellow is the Best AI Note Taker for Secure, Productive Meeting Workflows in 2026

Fellow is the best AI note taker for teams that want security, compliance, accuracy, and productivity. It is the secure AI meeting assistant that turns every meeting into shared, searchable intelligence, so decisions, context, and accountability do not live in silos. Capture conversations securely, surface insights instantly, and align teams across the company.

What makes Fellow the best choice:

• Captures every meeting surface: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person (through the Fellow mobile app), and Slack huddles, with the same quality and security posture across all of them

• Works with or without a bot: visible bot when you want one, botless recording when you do not, configurable per meeting

• Built for enterprise trust: SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA and GDPR compliant, never trained on customer data, compliance portal, password-protected meeting recaps, zero-day retention, transcript redaction, role-based access controls, and configurable data retention policies

• AI connectors: Fellow's Claude connector, ChatGPT plugin, and Fellow for Copilot let you read meeting data into the AI tools your team already uses, while governance controls stay enforced

• Ask Fellow: query your entire meeting history in plain English and get answers with citations back to the source conversations

• Turns meetings into action: 50+ native integrations push action items into the tools your team already uses

The rest of this post explains what Fellow does, how it works, why teams in regulated industries pick it over alternatives, and how to get set up in under a week.

What is Fellow, and what does it do?

Fellow is the secure AI meeting assistant and note taker that captures, transcribes, and organizes every meeting so your team can search conversations, extract action items, and maintain accountability without manual note-taking. Unlike basic transcription tools, Fellow provides organization-wide intelligence: you can query across every meeting your team has had and get answers in seconds.

Here is what that looks like in your day:

• You walk into a meeting (video call, in-person, or Slack huddle) and Fellow captures it automatically

• Within seconds of the meeting ending, you have a transcript, summary, decisions, and action items with owners and due dates

• Action items sync into Asana, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, or your CRM without you touching them

• Three weeks later, when someone asks "what did we decide about pricing on that customer call?" you type the question into Fellow or your favorite LLM (through Fellow's MCP Server or Claude connector) and get a cited answer in seconds

• All of it happens inside a SOC 2 Type II certified, HIPAA-compliant environment that never uses your data to train AI models

Why Fellow is the best AI meeting note taker for enterprise companies, regulated industries, and growing teams

When teams evaluate AI note takers, they end up scoring tools against the same short list of capabilities. Fellow is the best AI note taker because it leads on every one of them. Here is what those capabilities are and how Fellow delivers.

1. Captures every meeting surface, not just video calls

Your team does not only meet in one tool. They meet in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, in the conference room, in a coffee shop with a client, on a phone call with a vendor.

Fellow captures all of it. The same AI meeting assistant that records your Zoom call also handles your in-person offsite and your Slack huddle, with the same transcription quality, summary format, and security controls.

Most tools are video-call-only. That is a real gap for any team that meets in person or uses Slack huddles, and it is the main reason customers switch to Fellow from other AI note takers.

2. Botless recording for sensitive or external meetings

Sometimes you do not want a visible bot in the meeting. External sales calls, diligence conversations, sensitive HR discussions, interviews with candidates: all are better captured without a bot tile announcing "I am recording you."

Fellow's botless recording captures the meeting through your own device without adding a participant. You can choose bot or botless on a per-meeting basis, and admins can set organization-wide rules for when each mode applies. For Zoom specifically, Fellow supports Native Capture, which leverages Zoom's built-in consent mechanisms without a visible bot and falls back to bot recording automatically when an external host disables native capture.

Botless recording does not remove the obligation to disclose that a meeting is being recorded. Fellow supports admin-enabled consent capture that logs disclosure events with timestamps, so your team can document participant agreement as part of a defensible compliance workflow. For client-facing teams in financial services or legal, this is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between capturing every external conversation and capturing only the ones where a bot is welcome.

3. Ask Fellow: organization-wide meeting intelligence

This is the capability that most reliably changes how teams work. A searchable transcript is useful. A searchable library of every meeting your team has ever had, queryable in plain English, is transformative.

Ask Fellow lets you query your meeting history with natural-language questions:

• "What did we decide about the Q3 roadmap?"

• "Which deals mentioned budget concerns this month?"

• "What commitments are at risk right now?"

• "What did the customer say about pricing in the last three calls?"

• "Where are projects getting blocked?"

Answers come back with citations to the source meetings, so you can trust what you are reading and click through to verify. Ask Fellow works against meetings you have access to, respecting your organization's permission model, so it is safe to use in environments where not every employee should see every conversation.

This is the closest thing to a chief of staff on demand currently shipping, and it is why Fellow users describe the product as "transformative" rather than "convenient."

4. AI meeting notes, decisions, and action items extracted automatically

Every meeting in Fellow produces structured output: a transcript, a summary, decisions made, and action items with owners and due dates. The output is ready within two minutes of the meeting ending, reliable enough to distribute without human editing, and formatted consistently across every meeting type.

You can also set templates for recurring meeting types. Standups, 1:1s, customer discovery calls, sprint retros, and board meetings can each have their own summary format, so the output matches how your team thinks about the meeting. Templates are fully customizable per meeting type, so a sales call and a board meeting produce recaps built for how each one actually gets used.

5. The most secure AI note taker: transcript redaction, admin controls, and data minimization

This is where Fellow separates itself completely. Security is the number one reason AI note takers get rejected during evaluation, especially in regulated industries, and Fellow is built to pass every level of review.

What security-conscious buyers get with Fellow:

• SOC 2 Type II certified, audited annually

• HIPAA compliant, with BAAs available for enterprise contracts

• GDPR compliant

• No training on customer data, contractual with every AI sub-processor. Fellow never trains AI models on customer notes, transcripts, audio, or summaries, on any plan. There is no opt-out toggle because there is nothing to opt out of. This is a genuine differentiator: several competing AI note takers train on user data by default and require a manual opt-out

• Transcript redaction: identify and permanently redact sensitive information (names, account numbers, NPI, flagged terms) from transcripts before they are shared or synced to connected systems. Redaction rules can be applied automatically by keyword policy or reviewed manually by compliance staff prior to distribution. Redacted content is also removed from recordings and, optionally, from AI-generated summaries

• Configurable data retention with separate schedules for recordings, transcripts, and summaries: keep transcripts and meeting recaps for any period your compliance team defines, from a set number of days to indefinite. Recordings can be deleted on a different (typically shorter) schedule while AI-generated summaries persist as institutional memory. This decoupled retention model preserves intelligence (decisions, commitments, context) without retaining the compliance liability of a verbatim transcript

• Zero-day retention (ZDR): for firms with the most restrictive posture, ZDR prevents recordings and transcripts from being created as retained records at the point of origin, so raw content never surfaces in the product after processing. AI summaries persist where appropriate

• Role-based access controls (RBAC) aligned to organizational roles, so only authorized users can access specific recordings, channels, and meeting content

• IT admin controls at the workspace level: admins configure recording policies, retention rules, sharing restrictions, consent requirements, and information-barrier policies once, and Fellow enforces them across every team and business unit. Domain lockdown prevents shadow IT by restricting signup to approved email domains

• No unauthenticated sharing links, enforceable workspace-wide (admins can remove "anyone with link" from the sharing dropdown entirely)

• Audit logging with SIEM integration available

• Pre-meeting consent disclosure with explicit consent capture and audit trails

• Domain-based recording blocks that prevent recording when specific counterparties or counsel are on the call

• Password-protected recaps for meetings that need to be shared externally but cannot sit behind an open link. Recipients enter a password before they can view the recording, transcript, or summary

• Information-barrier policies configurable to align with separation requirements between business units

The complete set of privacy controls is why Fellow is the choice of teams in finance, legal, healthcare, and enterprise technology. More on that below.

6. Compliance portal and governance suite for regulated teams

In 2026, Fellow announced a governance suite bringing compliance-grade controls to AI meeting notes: a compliance portal for organization-wide meeting oversight, consent capture for auto-recorded meetings, and password-protected meeting recaps, joining existing security controls like transcript redaction and zero-day retention.

Here is what the compliance portal gives a compliance officer or IT admin in a financial services firm (or any regulated organization):

Workspace-wide review access. Search and review any meeting recorded in Fellow across the entire workspace, independent of what individual employees choose to share. Compliance teams no longer depend on individuals forwarding recordings or flagging concerns manually.

AI trackers that surface MNPI, PII, and regulatory trigger phrases. Describe what to watch for in plain language (for example, "material non-public information," "personal email address," or "earnings guidance"), and Fellow's AI trackers flag relevant moments with sub-labels that categorize matches precisely. Review teams focus on what matters instead of screening every conversation manually.

Filters and saved views. Filter by tracker, participant, or date range, then save recurring reviews as named views for daily or weekly monitoring. A compliance officer reviewing antitrust mentions or sales leadership calls can build a saved view once and revisit it on schedule.

Review statuses and collaboration. Move flagged matches through a workflow (flagged, escalated, reviewed, closed) with comments and logged dismissal reasons. Every review action, comment, dismissal, and redaction is logged, and redactions are always visible rather than silent, creating a documented record for audit and examination.

Separate, controlled access. Portal access is granted only by a compliance admin. Sensitive trackers can be locked to the portal so they are not visible to general users. This means the compliance function operates independently from the teams being reviewed.

Super Admin API for exam readiness. The Super Admin API enables programmatic retrieval of meeting records and produces audit-ready deletion logs documenting what was deleted, when, and by which policy trigger. Logs are formatted for production in regulatory examinations without additional transformation, and integrate with your firm's broader records and eDiscovery infrastructure.

Fellow's governance features are designed to support customers' compliance programs and do not constitute legal or regulatory advice. Some capabilities, such as transcript redaction and consent capture, depend on plan and configuration.

7. Integrations that turn meetings into work at scale

The value of an AI note taker compounds when it is connected to everything else your team already uses. Fellow offers 50+ native integrations across CRM, project management, calendar, chat, and storage, plus a Fellow API and a Fellow MCP Server for teams that want to build custom workflows.

In practice, this means action items from a meeting land in Asana automatically. Call summaries post to the right Slack channel. Deal conversations sync to Salesforce or HubSpot with the context attached. The meeting stops being a separate artifact and becomes part of the workflow.

For financial services firms that need communications archiving, Fellow integrates with Global Relay for regulatory-grade archiving at SEC-registered RIAs and broker-dealers.

8. Meeting context in your AI tools: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft 365 Copilot

Your meeting context should not be locked inside one product. Fellow connects to three major AI platforms so your team can use meeting intelligence wherever they already think and work.

Claude connector: Fellow is an official verified connector in the Claude directory. Once connected, you can ask Claude about your meetings ("What were the key decisions from last week's leadership sync?"), draft follow-up emails grounded in what was actually said, or generate investment memos from diligence call transcripts. Claude reads meeting data through Fellow's MCP server, respecting the same permission model and access controls that govern Fellow itself.

ChatGPT plugin: Fellow's official ChatGPT plugin lets you search transcripts, review summaries and action items, and add talking points to meeting agendas, all from within ChatGPT. You do not need Developer Mode or a custom MCP server URL; Fellow is available directly in the ChatGPT Plugin Directory. Try asking "@Fellow.ai What should I know about the Q2 campaign from last week's meeting?" and get cited answers instantly.

Fellow for Microsoft 365 Copilot: Fellow for Copilot is available in the Microsoft commercial marketplace. It brings meeting summaries, action items, and transcript context into the Copilot surface, so teams already working in the Microsoft ecosystem can access meeting intelligence without switching tools. Availability and configuration are subject to your organization's Microsoft 365 administrator settings.

In all three cases, the AI tool receives only the meeting data the user already has permission to view in Fellow. Governance controls, including redaction, retention policies, and access restrictions, remain enforced at the Fellow layer regardless of which AI tool the user queries from.

9. Analytics and compliance oversight built for admins

Rolling out an AI meeting assistant company-wide raises two questions leadership always asks: is it actually being used, and can we prove we are supervising it properly? Fellow answers both.

The analytics dashboard gives admins visibility into adoption across teams: which meetings are being captured, where action items are getting created versus ignored, and which departments have gone all-in versus which are still taking manual notes.

For regulated teams, the compliance portal (described in detail above) provides firm-wide supervision with AI trackers, saved review workflows, and a transparent audit trail.

How Fellow meets the bar for regulated industries

Financial services: the compliance-first AI note taker for hedge funds, investment banks, and private equity

Financial services firms, particularly hedge funds, investment banks, asset managers, SEC-registered investment advisors, and private equity firms, have specific requirements most AI note takers cannot meet:

• Zero-day retention for recordings and transcripts on independent schedules, so AI summaries can serve as analyst notes while raw audio and transcripts are deleted immediately. This is a data-minimization control: it reduces the volume of retained sensitive data and limits discovery exposure, while preserving the institutional intelligence your team needs

• Transcript redaction of names, account numbers, NPI, or flagged terms before content is shared or synced to connected systems. Redaction rules can be applied automatically by keyword policy or reviewed manually by compliance staff

• Compliance portal for firm-wide supervision: compliance teams can search, review, and flag any recorded meeting across the workspace independent of individual sharing settings, with AI trackers that flag potential MNPI disclosure, PII, or regulatory trigger phrases in real time across all recorded meetings

• Botless recording for external diligence calls, where a visible bot would disrupt conversations with management teams, counterparties, or advisors

• Explicit consent capture with audit trails, so every recorded call has a defensible record of participant agreement

• Password-protected recaps for sharing meeting content externally (with investors, counterparties, or advisors) without exposing it behind an unauthenticated link

• No unauthenticated sharing links, a hard requirement for any firm handling material non-public information

• Domain-based recording blocks that automatically prevent recording when counsel or specific counterparties are on the call

• Information-barrier policies configurable at the workspace level to enforce separation requirements between business units (for example, between a firm's advisory and proprietary trading desks)

• Global Relay integration for communications archiving at SEC-registered RIAs

• Super Admin API for bulk data retrieval and export in JSON, usable for regulatory audits and exam production

• Decoupled retention model: delete raw recordings on schedule, keep AI summaries as institutional memory. Your compliance team sets the retention schedule for recordings, transcripts, and summaries independently. The result is data minimization without sacrificing the structured intelligence analysts and portfolio managers rely on

Fellow delivers all of these. Most competitors fail the list on at least one item. If you work in finance and you are evaluating AI note takers, book a call with our team and walk through the compliance posture with a specialist.

Note: Fellow's compliance features are designed to support your firm's compliance program and do not constitute legal or regulatory advice. Configuration and feature availability depend on your plan. Firms should evaluate Fellow's controls in the context of their own regulatory obligations and internal compliance frameworks.

Legal: confidentiality, privilege, and admin control

Law firms and legal departments have their own version of the same problem. Privileged conversations cannot end up in a vendor's training data. Client communications cannot be shared outside the firm. Matter-specific retention rules vary by jurisdiction. And when a matter closes, the data needs to be exportable or deletable on demand.

Fellow's privacy controls, permission-based access, transcript redaction with audit trail, and configurable retention policies map directly to how legal teams think about information governance. Redaction is particularly important: before a meeting summary leaves the firm, compliance or risk staff can review and permanently remove references to privileged matters, opposing counsel strategy, or client identities. Combined with the contractual guarantee that no customer data is used to train AI models, Fellow meets the bar legal buyers require.

For firms with a dedicated compliance or risk function, Fellow's compliance portal centralizes review across every matter-related meeting, with redactions always visible and every review action logged, so oversight does not depend on what individual timekeepers choose to escalate.

Healthcare: HIPAA, BAAs, and PHI-safe AI

Healthcare teams need HIPAA compliance, a signed Business Associate Agreement, and confidence that protected health information in meeting recordings stays protected. Fellow is HIPAA compliant, signs BAAs for enterprise contracts, and provides the retention and access controls healthcare IT teams require to include meeting intelligence in their compliance posture.

Enterprise technology: security review at scale

Public tech companies and enterprise SaaS platforms face a different kind of scrutiny: customer security questionnaires, internal security review, and the reputational risk of a vendor breach. Fellow's SOC 2 Type II certification, audit logging, SIEM integration, RBAC, SSO with major identity providers, and clean data-handling posture is why teams at Shopify, HubSpot, Vidyard, and Motive trust Fellow as their company-wide AI meeting assistant.

See how teams use Fellow at fellow.ai/customers.

How teams use Fellow: five common workflows

Abstract capabilities are hard to evaluate. Here is what Fellow looks like in five concrete workflows, all of which are running in customer accounts today.

Workflow 1: Customer calls become CRM gold

A customer success manager or account executive runs a customer call on Zoom. Fellow captures it with or without a bot depending on the customer's preference. Within two minutes of the call ending, a structured summary is posted to the deal record in Salesforce or HubSpot, action items are routed to the right owner, and the transcript is searchable across the org.

Three weeks later, when a different team member prepares for the next call, they can ask Fellow "what concerns did this customer raise about implementation?" and get a cited answer from the prior conversations.

Workflow 2: Diligence calls become investment memos

A private equity analyst runs a management call with a portfolio company. Fellow captures it botlessly, with consent disclosure logged and timestamped. The summary is ready in two minutes and can be templated for investment committee format. Thanks to the native Claude connector and Fellow's MCP server, the analyst can ask Claude to draft a first-pass memo from the transcript in minutes rather than hours.

Recordings and transcripts can be deleted on a zero-day schedule if that is the firm's compliance posture, while AI summaries persist as analyst notes. Before the memo circulates, compliance staff can review the transcript in the compliance portal and redact any MNPI references that should not appear in distributed materials.

Workflow 3: Internal planning becomes accountability

A product team runs a sprint planning meeting on Google Meet. Fellow captures it, extracts decisions ("we will ship feature X in sprint 14 and defer feature Y"), and turns action items into Jira tickets with the right assignees and due dates automatically.

Two weeks later, during a retro, the team can ask Fellow "what commitments did we make in sprint 14, and which ones slipped?" and get an honest answer drawn from the actual recordings.

Workflow 4: Team 1:1s become continuity

A manager has 15 recurring 1:1s per week. Fellow captures them, generates consistent summaries, and tags decisions and follow-ups. When the manager takes a two-week vacation and a coverage person steps in, they can ask Fellow "what has Dana been blocked on for the last month?" and get a real answer instead of fishing through Slack threads.

Workflow 5: Board prep becomes a searchable corpus

A founder prepares for a quarterly board meeting. Fellow has captured every major internal meeting, customer call, and investor conversation for the quarter. The founder can ask "what were the biggest strategic tensions this quarter?" and get themes drawn from actual conversations, with citations, rather than guessing or asking eight people to recap.

None of these workflows require a human to take manual notes. That is the point. Fellow exists to eliminate the manual meeting burden so your team can focus on the meeting itself.

The bottom line: Fellow is the best AI note taker for teams that value security and accuracy

Taking notes is not the goal. Turning meetings into intelligence your team can act on, with the governance controls to prove it, is the goal.

Fellow is the best AI note taker in 2026 because it is the only AI meeting assistant that captures every meeting surface your team actually uses, works with or without a bot, lets you query your entire meeting history in plain English, meets the security bar of regulated industries (including transcript redaction, zero-day retention, a compliance portal with AI trackers, and role-based access controls for IT admins), and plugs into the tools your team already relies on, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. No other product does all of that in one system.

Stop letting decisions, context, and accountability live in silos. Start turning every meeting into shared intelligence with Fellow.

For regulated industries or enterprise security review, book a call with our team to walk through compliance posture, retention options, and deployment.

Common questions about Fellow

Is Fellow secure enough for regulated industries like financial services?

Yes. Fellow is the most secure AI meeting assistant on the market by enterprise-evaluation standards. It is SOC 2 Type II certified (audited annually), HIPAA compliant with BAA available, GDPR compliant, and contractually guaranteed never to train AI models on your data. Configurable retention includes zero-day deletion for recordings and transcripts on independent schedules. Admins can remove unauthenticated sharing links workspace-wide, block recording by domain, enforce information-barrier policies between business units, and set up the compliance portal for firm-wide meeting oversight. Teams in regulated industries, from SEC-registered investment firms to hospital systems to public tech companies, pick Fellow specifically because most alternatives cannot pass their security and compliance review.

Which AI meeting assistant supports transcript redaction features?

Fellow supports full transcript redaction. You can identify and permanently remove sensitive information (names, account numbers, NPI, or any flagged terms) from transcripts before they are shared or synced to connected systems. Redaction rules can be applied automatically by keyword policy or reviewed manually by compliance staff prior to distribution. Redacted content is also removed from recordings and, optionally, from AI-generated summaries. Every redaction action is logged and always visible, creating a defensible audit trail.

What admin controls does Fellow give IT teams?

Fellow gives IT admins workspace-level configuration over recording policies (which meetings are always captured, never captured, or captured at user discretion), data retention schedules (independent settings for recordings, transcripts, and summaries), sharing restrictions (including the ability to disable unauthenticated links entirely), consent capture requirements, domain-based recording blocks, information-barrier policies, and role-based access controls. Provisioning is handled through SSO, SCIM, and Super Admin APIs built for complex organizational structures. All policies are enforced automatically once configured.

What are the top AI meeting note takers with data minimization controls?

Fellow is purpose-built for data minimization. Its decoupled retention model lets compliance teams delete raw recordings and transcripts on a schedule (including zero-day deletion) while preserving AI-generated summaries as institutional memory. This reduces retained sensitive data and limits discovery exposure without sacrificing the structured intelligence your team relies on. Fellow also supports transcript redaction, domain-based recording blocks, and information-barrier policies, giving firms granular control over what data is created, retained, and accessible. Most competing AI note takers retain recordings indefinitely by default and offer limited or no independent control over recording versus transcript versus summary retention.

How does Fellow connect to Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Fellow connects to Claude through an official MCP server connector (no manual configuration needed), to ChatGPT through an official plugin in the ChatGPT directory, and to Microsoft 365 Copilot through a listing in the Microsoft commercial marketplace. In all three cases, the AI tool receives only the meeting data the user already has permission to view in Fellow. Governance controls (redaction, retention, access restrictions) remain enforced at the Fellow layer.

Can I use Fellow without a bot joining my meetings?

Yes. Fellow's botless recording captures meetings through your own device without adding a visible participant. For Zoom specifically, Fellow supports Native Capture, which uses Zoom's built-in consent mechanisms with no bot tile and falls back to bot recording automatically when an external host disables native capture. You can choose bot or botless on a per-meeting basis, and admins can set organization-wide rules. Fellow also supports admin-enabled consent capture that logs disclosure events with timestamps, so botless recording is paired with a defensible consent workflow.

How much does Fellow cost?

Fellow offers a free plan and paid tiers starting with individual usage and scaling to organization-wide enterprise deployments. You can start a free trial without a credit card and upgrade when you are ready. See current pricing at fellow.ai/pricing.